Webinars

Live discussions of important social innovation topics

Our on-demand SSIR Live! webinars are offered every 4-6 weeks, and feature the Stanford Social Innovation Review’s most provocative and important topics. The registration fee is $49 per 2011-2014 webinar, or $19 per 2009/2010 webinar, and includes on-demand access for 12 months—so if you missed the live presentation, you can still register and view it at your convenience.

2013 has presented a complicated economic environment for funders. Join this complimentary webinar to hear from McCormick, Shilling Stein, Walker, and Wolf Ditkoff, who all take distinct yet complementary approaches to philanthropy. In this webinar the panelists will explain the new trends that are most influencing their giving, how they define and measure success, the questions they confront when deciding whether to stay the course or tack in shifting winds, how to flexibly engage communities enhances effectiveness, and the implications of their decisions on their partners and grantees.

Though it may seem counterintuitive for a sector already struggling to support, sustain, and scale up its impact—panelists Shore, Hammond, and Celep argue that nonprofits need to embrace a much heavier lift. They must look beyond short-term achievements that please funders, staff, and stakeholders but yield only incremental change, and instead hold themselves accountable for the harder-to-achieve long-term outcomes that will ultimately solve social problems.

#GivingTuesday is a celebratory kick-off day to the giving season. In its inaugural year last year, on #GivingTuesday online giving increased around 50% percent from the previous year. Donors gave millions to nonprofit organizations online and the day stoked a national conversation on giving. The second annual #GivingTuesday will take place on December 3. Do you have a plan for your organization to get the most benefit from this new national day of giving, just two months away? This complimentary webinar, by the generous support of the Knight Foundation, will provide nonprofits with ideas and implementation tools for helping their organizations get the most from #GivingTuesday.

How is it that Silicon Valley, a region burgeoning with new wealth and so noteworthy for its overall philanthropic giving, is uniquely spare in providing for its own neediest causes and populations? To better understand these trends, this webinar will explore new data from a review conducted by Philanthropy Futures, with support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s local grantmaking program, which took a deeper look at giving in Silicon Valley.

To celebrate SSIR’s tenth anniversary, the Spring 2013 issue featured more than a dozen essays on a variety of social innovation topics, including social entrepreneurship. For this complimentary webinar, we have assembled several essayists from that issue—all prominent leaders in the field of social entrepreneurship—to continue the discussion. Some of the questions that will be explored are: What have been the most significant changes in the field of social entrepreneurship in the last decade? How has the blurring of the nonprofit and for-profit sectors affected social entrepreneurship? Is the term social entrepreneur still a useful way to describe people leading social change? What will a social entrepreneur look like ten years from now? This complimentary webinar is made possible by the generous support of SSIR’s tenth anniversary sponsors.

Collaboration is a hot topic in philanthropy and a common practice, but one form remains uncommon. Few foundations and philanthropists pool their time, expertise, and financial resources around multiyear goals beyond the reach of any one participant. When they do, their unified action can yield impressive results. So why don’t such collaborations happen more often? Join Willa Seldon, a partner at Bridgespan, when she reviews the barriers to high stakes collaboration and how to work around them, and discusses the three types of collaborations that work best. She will be joined by Oak Foundation’s Kristian Parker, a founding board member of the European Climate Foundation and the Oceans 5 donor collaborative. Parker will add first-hand insights and explain how new donors can benefit from joining forces with those, like the Oak Foundation, that have expertise in a particular area.

Join us to explore how to address the next phase in the collective impact dialogue, complexity, and create an intentional process that allows for effective solutions. John Kania, coauthor of SSIR’sEmbracing Emergence: How Collective Impact Addresses Complexity, will discuss this next phase and define “emergence,” a term that describes events that are unpredictable and which no one organization or individual can control. He will be joined by Blair Taylor, who shares from experience the implications of complexity and emergence in Memphis Fast Forward’s work, and Mark Cabaj, who will cover developmental evaluation in collective impact. This lively discussion will focus on why collective impact is a relevant approach for complex problems and how leaders of successful collective impact initiatives have embraced a new way of collectively seeing, learning and doing that marries emergent solutions with intentional outcomes. The webinar will help participants understand the implications of complexity and emergence in their work and how developmental evaluation can advance collective learning to reach better and more robust outcomes.

To become more effective, nonprofits and foundations are turning to various sources for advice. Some look to experts, others turn to crowdsourcing. Experts and crowds can produce valuable insights, but too often nonprofits and funders ignore the constituents who matter most, the intended beneficiaries. Join Fay Twersky, Phil Buchanan, and Valerie Threlfall as they discuss the reasons why surveying beneficiaries is so important, how the feedback can be used, and some of the challenges to doing this and how to overcome them. They will also provide real-world examples of organizations that are effectively surveying beneficiaries, including their own experience trying to elicit the voices of high school students through YouthTruth, a nonprofit that the three of them co-founded. YouthTruth has gathered feedback from close to 150,000 students across the United States.

Social media and the Internet have permanently disrupted the traditional donor-engagement process through online competitions, viral video campaigns, and mobile giving, to name a few. With each new way for organizations and donors to interact come increasingly complex entry points into the traditional models of donor engagement, greater variation in movement along the pathway to deeper engagement, and more opportunities for a person to be influenced by forces outside an organization’s control. Join Georgetown University’s Julie Dixon and Denise Keyes as they discuss this impact. They’ll also provide insights on these trends gleaned from a nationwide research project that their Center for Social Impact Communications conducted with Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, and will explain a new model of donor engagement they have created that takes advantage of social media and the Internet—one that is more fluid and continuous, and that better reflects the growing importance that a person’s influence plays in the process.

On every CEO’s “worry list” is whether he or she has the leaders the organization needs to thrive in the future. Will current managers be ready to step up? If not, then what? In this webinar, Kramer and Nayak of The Bridgespan Group will share key findings in Plan A: How Successful Nonprofits Develop Their Future Leaders, a new Bridgespan guide that provides a step-by-step approach to creating and executing a leadership development program at nonprofits of any size and budget. The presenters will identify essential steps to develop and increase your organization’s talent and build a best practice.